Disciplines v.2.0

It's a new year and I am back where I started. Or better said, finishing what I started. I keep coming back to this book. I annually sit down in December and consider my life over the year. I look at what I accomplished and what I didn't accomplish. Ways that I've grown and failed to grow. Then I come up with a series of goals for the new year. They are not resolutions per se. They are actually things that I am setting plans out to accomplish. Some are events or accomplishments. Others are attitudes and lifestyle goals (getting that tummy under control...),

blocs are great resources for learning about goal planning. I've learned a lot from them. But then I come back to this book. It grounds me. Goals are good. They reflect an inner desire for what could (should) be but is not yet. However, the real struggle is the balance between what I can and must do and what the Lord must do. What a balance it is! We can make tremendous changes on the outside. However, only God can make changes on the inside. To be whole, the inner life must direct the outer.

In the first chapter Foster describes life as a path with a chasm on each side. On one side is the chasm of moral bankruptcy through trying to apply the will to resolve life's problems (overcoming that darker, undesirable inner part of us). On the other side is the chasm of moral bankruptcy of the "absence of human strivings. The path leads to the inner transformation and healing for which we seek." The path is not what produces the change. It is God's grace that we receive on the path which changes and heals us.

The Spiritual Disciplines put us in the environment to receive God's grace so that the gap between what we are and what we are meant to be can be closed. I am keeping this in mind entering this new year. I need a big heaping dollop of grace to become what my goals reflect. But not just one dollop; dollop upon dollop upon dollop. Slop it on Lord!